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A quintet of Silver Best Sellers on Jonstown Compendium


MOB

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15 minutes ago, MOB said:

A quintet of Silver Best Sellers: Congratulations to the creators of all five initial Jonstown Compendium releases. And 'Temples and Towers', Martin Helsdon's follow-up to his best-selling 'Armies and Enemies of Dragon Pass' has already achieved Copper Best Seller status too.

 

Congrats all, and when money permits I will be purchasing more, until I have the original five (I'm at two now with M Helsden's Opus, and Christmas is coming, hint hint)! I was privileged to be invited into Yozarian’s thrill ride by RuneBlogger and having read it at least a dozen times as part of my duties, I can strongly recommend it! It’s a worthy successor to the legendary "Money Tree" and dare I say it truly is all it is quacked up to be!

Congrats boys, you finished on time with a great product!

Cheers

Edited by Bill the barbarian

... remember, with a TARDIS, one is never late for breakfast!

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10 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

Are the selling numbers something you're able/willing to talk about? I would be interested to learn what kind of creator money we're talking about for these products.

Individual creators creators can go into specifics about their own creations if they wish.

The metal icons are described here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/metal.php

Only 10.08% of products on DriveThru are at Silver Seller status.

Some Miskatonic Repository creators have made hundreds and in a few cases even thousands of dollars from their work, though the returns for most have been more modest. An important axiom is if you want to make any sort of financial return from community content, whatever you do don't make your creation "Pay What You Want", even with a recommended price. Because the typical price people will pay is ZERO. Put a monetary value on your work, even if that price is 99c. Of course, if you want to make your product free or PWYW and don't mind about what financial return you might receive, that's entirely up to you. 

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1 hour ago, MOB said:

...

An important axiom is if you want to make any sort of financial return from community content, whatever you do don't make your creation "Pay What You Want", even with a recommended price. Because the typical price people will pay is ZERO. Put a monetary value on your work, even if that price is 99c. Of course, if you want to make your product free or PWYW and don't mind about what financial return you might receive, that's entirely up to you. 

I'd have thought all of that was a given, even for less amateur productions!  Still, well worth pointing out to those new to the program!

But I'm still befuddled by the commercial success of Posthuman Studio's "PWYW" model for Eclipse Phase  (not just "PWYW" but "Creative Commons BY-NA-SA" PDF's, art&layout included!)

Presumably, whatever Dark Gods the folks over at Posthuman have sacrificed to, the DTRPG "Community Content" folk don't know the right deities and/or rituals...    😁

 

(N.B.  not entirely off-topic for a Cthulhu forum, because  (1) EP includes a fair portion of existential Cosmic Horror, and  (2) the core mechanic is a d100-variant... although not (alas!) close enough to BRP for there to be the customary easy interchange of content!  Would 'twere otherwise... I could see a pretty cool EP crossover with Pulp Cthulhu ... ) .

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3 minutes ago, g33k said:

I'd have thought all of that was a given, even for less amateur productions!  Still, well worth pointing out to those new to the program!

But I'm still befuddled by the commercial success of Posthuman Studio's "PWYW" model for Eclipse Phase  (not just "PWYW" but "Creative Commons BY-NA-SA" PDF's, art&layout included!)

Presumably, whatever Dark Gods the folks over at Posthuman have sacrificed to, the DTRPG "Community Content" folk don't know the right deities and/or rituals...    😁

 

(N.B.  not entirely off-topic for a Cthulhu forum, because  (1) EP includes a fair portion of existential Cosmic Horror, and  (2) the core mechanic is a d100-variant... although not (alas!) close enough to BRP for there to be the customary easy interchange of content!  Would 'twere otherwise... I could see a pretty cool EP crossover with Pulp Cthulhu ... ) .

I'll point out that Eclipse Phase is definitely not pay-what-you-want.  Their products all have set prices, it's just that people are free to share them if they like.

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1 hour ago, Lysus said:

I'll point out that Eclipse Phase is definitely not pay-what-you-want.  Their products all have set prices, it's just that people are free to share them if they like.

Their entire line of PDFs is available under CC-BY-NA-SA; there's a few carefully-noted exceptions (one artist, a separately-freely-licensed logo THEY use, etc).

https://eclipsephase.com/cclicense

(that's for the new 2e, but 1e was similar).

In principle, you could grab all the text and art you liked and recombine bits into your own highly-customized however-many-page sourcebook for your own campaign, Lulu it off for your players...

 

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On 12/16/2019 at 11:11 PM, MOB said:

Of course, if you want to make your product free or PWYW and don't mind about what financial return you might receive, that's entirely up to you. 

As an experiment have put one item up for PWYW (it is only five pages long) and 19 people put in a total of $22.04; and another 27 'purchased' the item, but paid nothing so beware. For this item, as an earlier version was already out in the world, I decided not to charge. However, I would not advise doing this for new content.

For the other two items, which have a price, one has sold more than seventy copies, and the other is now well over a hundred. The royalty accruing is a very pleasant surprise, but unless you are incredibly lucky, you aren't going to make massive amounts of money, and given the time and effort the larger book has taken, the earnings aren't a realistic remuneration -- but that isn't why anyone would do this sort of thing.

It is a bit surreal to see my main title, with its black & white cover, still nestling among professional books with professional color covers.

In the game industry, it was once said, I believe, that the best way to become an industry millionaire was to start with ten million.  And that was for professionals...

Edited by M Helsdon
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My Early Family History is PWYW with a recommended price of $1. It has now reached Copper Best Seller with 142 copies sold at an average of $0.66.

I chose the PWYW-model for two reasons: 1. it's publicly crowdsourced material written for the public by several authors, and 2. I don't want the hassle of dividing the negligible amount of dollars between the various authors.

I think there are more factors to consider than "how much royalty will I earn from this particular publication". Letting more people have a look at RQ/Glorantha material without cost might work as advertisement for the game system, potentially increasing future sales of other publications. The same goes for you as a writer: if you produce very good content, making one (minor) publication free could be a way to show off your skills.

But I remember working in retail, listening to a business consultant: "If you need to increase revenue, raise your prices."

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23 minutes ago, 7Tigers said:

Remembering that a lot of people are very reluctant to pay "too much" for a non official pdf. Or even for an official one...

Depends on the quality....  i think everything i've seen so far in terms of quality to price seems well priced.

Martins books at the top end is a labor of love that (i will purchasing after Christmas) , that deserves the high price.

Most of the scenario packs for $5.00 seem like cracking value.

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  • 5 weeks later...
3 minutes ago, Shiningbrow said:

I'm curious as to what cut the authors get... Which I'm sure is public knowledge, but I can't be stuffed searching for it.

Creator gets 50%

DTRPG gets 30%

Chaosium gets 20%

(according to info previously provided)

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  • 2 weeks later...
2 hours ago, Jon Hunter said:

I'm reading it right now. It's excellent and one of the best [useful] products in the JC.
Just one thing: There are many typing errors and sentences which aren't going anywhere. Seems very rushed.

But the quality of the supplement [content] is topnotch and a wonderful resource for GM's.
 

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6 hours ago, prinz.slasar said:

I'm reading it right now. It's excellent and one of the best [useful] products in the JC.
Just one thing: There are many typing errors and sentences which aren't going anywhere. Seems very rushed.

But the quality of the supplement [content] is topnotch and a wonderful resource for GM's.
 

Prinz drop me a couple of examples.

You have just described my english skills perfectly, but most of the document was thoroughly proofed by a  third party apart from back pages and the settings area. Which i've reread and cant find anything glaring.

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7 hours ago, Puckohue said:

I've sold 271 copies of Early Family History but it's still listed as "Silver".

Unfortunately, DrivethruRPG doesn't agree that you have "sold" 271 copies of your Family History PDF. DTRPG does not count free downloads as "sales", at least not for the medal calculations. As we have politely pointed out, while you are welcome to set an item as "pay what you want", you should be prepared for half of the people who "buy" it to pay nothing. That's the case for your book.

I looked at a few of our free download items on DTRPG and none of them have a medal next to them, even though we know they have been downloaded hundreds or even thousands of times.

Hope that Helps,
Rick Meints - Chaosium, Inc.

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1 hour ago, Rick Meints said:

I looked at a few of our free download items on DTRPG and none of them have a medal next to them, even though we know they have been downloaded hundreds or even thousands of times.

As one of our troll PCs was fond of saying when he picked up Iron weapons, "Twice nothing is nothing".

Simon Phipp - Caldmore Chameleon - Wallowing in my elitism since 1982. Many Systems, One Family. Just a fanboy. 

www.soltakss.com/index.html

Jonstown Compendium author. Find my contributions here

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